BEIJING — Zhao Jingxin is considered a patriot. His father, a Chinese Christian theologian, urged him to return to China to support the Communists when they took power, and Zhao did. He plays tennis with powerful Communist Party elders.
But in rapidly modernizing Beijing, even good connections may not save his small 400-year-old house from the bulldozers that already have turned his neighborhood into rubble.
Struggles for historical preservation have been an uphill battle, pitting owners of small houses against the city government, which controls all land rights and makes lucrative real estate deals without public scrutiny.
"It's all just about making money," says Zhao, who isn't interested in compensation, just historical preservation.
Zhao filed a lawsuit this month contending that demolition would be illegal because the land is not needed for the public good. Beijing wants to build a five-story shopping mall, but it already has three times the office and shopping space it can use, Zhao contends.
One-story, walled houses with rounded tile roofs and central courtyards with trees for fruit and shade lined Beijing's lanes for centuries. In the past decade, vast swaths of these neighborhoods have been torn down and replaced with enormous towers.
Zhao's home was never grand like some of the neighboring ones that were torn down. Still, it has some elegant and historic flourishes, such as brick carvings of a cat, butterfly and peonies.
"I don't want money. I have a responsibility as a Chinese to protect this Ming dynasty house," Zhao said, sitting in his small living room where the high, white walls are decorated with calligraphy and photographs.
When the city leveled his neighbors' homes over a year ago, Zhao refused to leave. So far he has been spared the city's usual tactic against homeowners who resist: forced eviction by police.
The treatment may have to do with his past. Son of theologian and communist supporter T.C. Chao, Zhao left a good job in British Hong Kong with the losing Nationalist government's airline and returned to the mainland just after the communist victory in 1949.
He and his wife soon moved into the courtyard house. Now a fit 82, Zhao plays in a seniors tennis league, along with retired and current party politicians.
To save his house, Zhao has written to a central government official, whose name he will not disclose, in one final plea.
But Zhao is not optimistic. If he loses, he could be forced out quickly. The developer, the Wangfujing Real Estate Development Co., is an extension of the city government, Zhao says. Repeated requests to a local government office for comment from the company were turned down.
Just down the block is recently widened Peace Avenue. After knocking down the gray-walled houses and the trees that once lined the street, the city declared the new thoroughfare would have a last dynasty look. New shops, many still empty a year after the reconstruction, have little trims of fake tile roofs. Their walls, made from concrete, are painted a traditional gray.
A similar bit of faux history lies just outside town — an amusement park with a scaled-down model of the old city wall. The real wall was torn down early in Beijing's communist development and replaced by a highway.
All this tearing down and building a few fake replacements is "really unprincipled, and it hurts me very much to see it," said Liang Congjie, an environmentalist and historian who joined the appeal to save Zhao's house.
Liang's father, a U.S.-trained architect, pleaded with Mao Tse-tung — to no avail — to turn the city wall into a promenade and build the modern city outside it.
In writing about Zhao's effort to save his house, even the People's Daily lamented the rapid disappearance of everything that made Beijing familiar. Between 1990 and 1998, 45 million square feet of old housing, mostly courtyard houses, were torn down, the Communist Party's main newspaper reported.
"Many were so structurally beautiful and of such fine quality that even the workers dismantling them had to marvel," it said. But now so many houses have been razed that to talk of historical preservation "is like strengthening the sheep pen after all the sheep are dead."